


gravity.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-11 20:53:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat





	gravity.

> gravity,1 _. the natural force that causes things to fall toward the earth_

Sometimes he still thinks he is falling. When he closes his eyes too quickly, or when he opens them very wide and looks straight up, at the sun, at the moon, at the stars in the sky.  When he stands in the center of a room and the world shifts under his feet, when he stops moving and feels the planet tilting around him, spinning until he covers his face with his palms and holds his head in his hands, feeling the grounding press of fingers against his forehead.  

When he is in the backseat of Dean’s car and Dean is edging over the speed limit, when he catches Dean's gaze in the rear view mirror.  He closes his eyes and feels the earth rushing underneath, until he opens them again and leans his head on the cool glass of the window.  Sometimes he is hit with a sudden wave of feeling, the frantic hot rush he’d felt as his vessel was flung to earth.  He hears it pounding in his ears.  This must be his heart, he thinks.  

Sometimes Dean will look at him and he feels it all over again.  Dean will look at him and Castiel is pulled towards him; Dean is the center of a vast multitude of small universes, all of Castiel’s own making, and so he circles around Dean endlessly.  He fights off the pull, rails against this hold on him.  He is endless, eternal.  He is always in orbit.  He is always falling.

\--

He feels he understands  _need_.  He has found out what need feels like.  Need is when his stomach is aches with emptiness.  Need is when his body presses close into another's, an escape from cold and and the vast impenetrable feeling of falling like rain between the needles of a pine tree, falling unnoticed in the glances of strangers as they walk past him on the street.  

He feels this need, even now.  Need is what carries him down this road.  Need is what keeps him stopping every four hundred miles to fill up gas.  Need is a hard, aching thing.  In all his time on earth, he has never been so pressed by any single sensation, something so basic.  He tells himself that he is free.  He knows that it is not true.  

It helps that he has a car now, one of his own.  He can lock himself inside, he can drive away from certain things.  He can drive towards others.  Dean is out there, circling around the state.  Castiel is driving; no matter what he tells himself his destination is, he knows where he is headed.  

Dean calls him, late that night.  He never knows what drives Dean to this.  Dean calls him with no reason to offer, no excuse, just  _I need you_  and then a pause, an intake of breath, then a curious silence that Castiel can't understand. It pulls him towards Dean.  Dean knows that it does.  That's why he uses them.  

"Cas," Dean says.  "Where are you?" 

"What do you need?" Castiel asks him.  

"Find me," he says, and then, hesitant, "Can you still find me?"  Castiel wants to laugh.  He would still feel Dean out there at the other end of the world.  At the far end of the universe he would still feel that fierce grip of Dean holding on to him.  Dean put a name to that hold, once.  Castiel thinks he called it  _need_.  It weighs on him, this need of Dean's.  It is a heavy thing to carry on his shoulders.  It is at once both the most fragile burden he has ever carried and the strongest.  

"Cas," Dean is saying. "Please."  He's saying it all over again; not the word he uses sometimes, that word that might be a placeholder for some other thing entirely, but he is saying it nonetheless.  Castiel has keys and a car and an empty stretch of highway spread out before him and he feels cornered, pressed up against a wall, held fast between the universe and Dean and his need.   

He doesn't turn around.  He keeps going.  He drives in the opposite direction for twenty minutes, fighting the urge to turn around.  To turn towards Dean. Dean, who needs him.  

Finally he stops the car.  He shuts off the engine. He sits there in the quiet, listing to the small soft rattling noises of the engine cooling down.  It is a long time before he realizes what he is doing. He thinks he is listening.  He is hearing it again, that curious silence he has heard in the moments before Dean begins to pray, the silence just before he tilts his head towards the sky, his mouth open and seeking as though he is anticipating a kiss.  It is the high-pitched crackling sound he hears the cellphone make before it begins to ring, when Dean is calling him.  It is a long time before he realizes that this curious, hesitant quiet is the sound of waiting.  

He is held in Dean's orbit.  He is always falling.

He turns over the engine.

\--

It is still dark when Dean meets him on the side of the road.  He is leaning against the side of the Impala, hands in the pockets of his coat.  He is looking up.  He doesn't look at Castiel when he approaches.

"Sometimes," Dean is saying, "I still think you're gonna show up.  The way you used to. Out of nowhere."

"It was never," Castiel cannot resist telling him, "out of  _nowhere_."  He has always been somewhere.  Sometimes he has been in many different places at once, but he has always been somewhere.  Dean never understands.  Castiel is either there with him, wherever he is, or Castiel is nowhere, left inside some nebulous idea of nothing.

Dean is still staring up.  His mouth is hanging open, the way it does when he is about to speak, to snarl, to pray.  To kiss.  "What are you doing?" Castiel asks.

"Looking," Dean says.

"At what?"

"Just looking."

Dean and his needs are always unsatisfied.  Dean needing always gives life to new needs, new wants.  Dean and his needs always spark something new in Castiel.  Just now Castiel is feeling a need to sigh.

"What did you want?"

"Shh," Dean says, and it takes Castiel by surprise.  "Just- be here."

"And do what?"  

"Look at the stars," Dean says.  " Just. Stay here. And look with me. Just for a minute, okay?"  

He stands underneath the stars and the planets.  He stands with Dean and looks up.  He knows it is a cold night.  He feels Dean shivering under his jacket. He shifts his weight and presses his shoulder close to Castiel's. 

“How come you’re not up there?” Dean asks finally.

"Because I fell," he says, though he knows that this is not a question that needs an answer.  He knows heaven is not quite empty.  Angels are still falling.  Every night as he drives along highways and interstates he can see more angels falling, in ones and twos and threes, flaring bright and then waning as they hurtle towards the earth, reflecting in his rear view mirror.  

Angels are falling tonight.  He sees one shoot past across the sky and then disappear.  

Dean closes his eyes and sucks in a deep breath. He holds it for a moment.  “What are you doing?” Castiel asks him.

“Making a wish,” Dean says.  

“What?”

"You're supposed to make wishes on shooting stars.  You should do it, too."

"Then I wish that another angel did not just fall from heaven."

"Wish for something else," Dean tells him.  "What do you want?”

“I thought,” he says warily, “that you weren’t supposed to say.”

Dean leans into him.  He is a warm weight against Castiel's arm.  "I won't tell," Dean says.

"I wish this never happened," he says, and he can hear Dean go quiet.  The waiting kind of quiet.  

"Would you go back there?" Dean asks him, finally.  "If you could?"

Castiel opens his mouth to answer and finds he does not have one to offer.  Here, there: he is being pulled in every direction.  How pointless it is to have to consider this.  He is pulled towards his brothers. He is pulled towards heaven,  He is pulled towards Dean.  He is floating somewhere between earth and sky.  Giving up heaven is nothing compared to the thought of losing Dean.  Only he does not have Dean, only the weight of Dean's need hanging on to him like the tail of a comet.  He might chose heaven, if he had to.  He doesn’t know how to explain it to Dean.  He doesn’t know how to tell Dean that whatever Dean thinks he needs, it’s not him.  It is not this. Dean would discover that, sooner or later.  

“I wish I belong with you,” he says.  

Dean turns to him.  “With me?” he asks.  

“Yes.”   

"Cas."  Dean says it as though he is stating a proven theory, a law of the universe. "You do."  

Castiel wonders how he can say things like that.  Without fear.  Like it's a fundamental truth, a basic fact of his existence.  "No," he says.  "I don't."

Dean pulls his shoulder back.  "Then you shouldn't have come."

"Why not?"

Dean says, without anger but with a certain hardness, "Because I need you.  Because you don't want to be needed.  Because you don't like me--"

“I like you.”

“You can't," he says.  "You can't.  It's gone."

“What is?”

“What you must’ve liked.  It’s all gone.”  His voice is hoarse.  “Goodness.  Or righteousness. Whatever it was, it's not there anymore.  How could anyone--”

He turns his head and looks at Dean, really looks at him.  He raises his hand and touches Dean’s face.  “You’re crying.”

“Yeah, well.”  

He uses his thumb to carefully wipe the dampness under Dean’s eyes.  Dean holds himself very still.  

Castiel says, “I  could.”

Dean raises his face.  

“Cas,” Dean is saying, he’s moving forward, hand outstretched.  Dean wants to touch him.  To kiss him, maybe.  Castiel can’t let that happen. He closes his eyes and feels the world under his feet.  The very foundation of the earth is shaking.  

“Dean,” he says, slow, “Dean, if I give this up-”  He isn't sure what he means.  Heaven. Himself.  The weight of Dean's need.  He says, feeling helpless and shaken and out of his depth, "You shouldn't have to need me."

"Cas." Dean is shaking his head.  He puts his hands on Castiel's face and pulls him close and he is earth and Castiel is the moon moving around him.  

He needs me, Castiel thinks, he needs me so, he needs my hands on his face and my mouth on his forehead; he needs me.  He needs my arms around him and my mouth dipping to his lips, he needs me.  He needs me to hold him.  He needs this, he needs me like this.  This is what I am here for.  He needs me.  He needs my mouth here, and here, and here.  Dean pulls him close and his fingers are shaking and he is smiling, just a small funny smile that holds Castiel still as he says, "It's not just that. It's not just  _need._ "

He is falling, he is falling all over again, and as the stars begin to rush past his ears he thinks he hears Dean calling his name.  Dean is saying his name, breathing it out in soft pleading whispers.  “Castiel,” he is saying, “Castiel.”  

\--

Dean holds him for what feels like a very long time.  Finally he says, his words coming out in the warm breaths against the side of Castiel's face, "I should go."

Castiel puts his arms around his neck and clings to him, puts his face in the side of Dean’s neck.  He can feel Dean’s breath, hot and quick and shallow, and Dean is saying his name.  He can feel Dean press press his lips into the skin below his ear.  He feels like a supernova, a star burning out in a wave of heat and brilliance.  He feels like a sun.  He is the center of someone’s universe.  There is someone out there in this infinitesimally tiny, small world who is falling for him.  

“When will you come back?” he asks.

“Back to what?” Dean says.  

“To me,” he says.  He doesn’t know why he says it. 

“To you,” he says at last.  Then, a question.  “To you?”

“Yes,” he says.

Dean kisses him timidly on the corner of his mouth, uncertain, unsure.  I need you, it says.  Dean says it with everything he does.  With his hands.  With his mouth.  With his head pressed against Castiel's face, his cheek turned close to Castiel's own, looking him straight in the eye.  He rests his forehead on Castiel’s and that says it too.  Castiel knows.  And for the first time, he thinks he might understand.

“You hold me here,” he says.  It is a truth of his existence.

“Castiel," Dean is saying, “Castiel,”  and the syllables stretch out in the quiet between them, and Castiel is falling, falling, drawn to the earth by the pull of that love.

 

> _prompt from[weir](http://weirdhermitsunited.tumblr.com/)_ _[dhermitsunited](http://weirdhermitsunited.tumblr.com/): C as’ headspace while Dean is gone, trying to reconcile what he felt as a human with how he feels as an angel._


End file.
